You know that guy who's at every party, the one who loves to hear himself talk and tells long-winded stories while the unlucky few who got caught in his gravitational pull nod politely and and start eyeing the exits?
Yeah. David Guterson is That Guy.
His book has a really intersesting subject: a few years after World War Two, a man of Japanese descent is accused of killing a white man on the small island community of San Piedro. The story follows the trial and breaks every now and then for flashbacks about various characters' pasts. Good story, but Guterson bogs it down with absolutely pointless backstories and details. I didn't need to know, for example, what six different random San Piedro residents did when the huge blizzard hit, or how the accused man's wife's mother was a mail order bride from Japan. And I think the book would have been equally enjoyable if Guterson hadn't treated his readers to a description of how the murder victim spent his last day alive screwing his wife in the shower.
Guterson also works hard to keep his story dramatic (the courtroom scenes, I might add, are mind-numbingly boring). The accused man, Miyamoto, at first denies knowledge of the murder and then changes his story towards the end of the book, and whenever a character asks Miyamoto why he didn't tell the truth from the beginning, Guterson is careful to arrange the dialogue so Miyamoto never has to actually answer that question. Similarly, when a character uncovers some Very Important Evidence towards the end of the book, he takes his sweet time delivering the evidence to the judge so Guterson can stretch his story out for thirty more pages.
By the last fifty pages of the book, I was just waiting for it to end and hoping there would be a really good twist ending that would make the whole experience better.
(by the way: there isn't one)

UPDATE: This. A thousand times this.

Does anyone know of other fiction books that discuss the internment of the Japanese Americans during WW2? I would really enjoy to read more books on that aspect of the war.

This book is quite unique. It involves a murder mystery, as well as a story of the racism suffered by our own citizens during WW2 when our country chose to imprison our own citizens based on their appearance. I found the descriptions of setting rich and textured and tangible. I have never seen strawberry fields, or the misty, foggy mornings of a wet and green land. And yet, I felt as though I had. I enjoyed the childhood friendship between the children that were then separated by war -- or more accurately by race. And I enjoyed the twists of the story about a murder, and trying to figure out what happened.

My only real complaint is that sometimes the descriptions were too lengthy. I think this book would be better if it were about 50 pages shorter.

This dude really needed a ruthless editor.

My first 5-star read of the year! The novel is set in 1954 on San Piedro, an island of 5,000 off the coast of Washington state. A decade on from the war, the community’s chickens come home to roost when a Japanese American man, Kabuo Miyamoto, is charged with murdering a fellow fisherman, Carl Heine. The men had been engaged in a dispute over some land – seven acres of strawberry fields that were seized from the Miyamoto family when, like the rest of the country’s Japanese population, they were rounded up in internment camps. Meanwhile, Ishmael Chambers, who runs the local newspaper and lost an arm in the war, stumbles on a piece of evidence that might turn the case around. Still in love with Hatsue, now Kabuo’s wife but once his teenage obsession, he is torn between winning her back and wanting to do what’s right.

Guterson alternates between trial scenes and flashbacks to war service or stolen afternoons Ishmael and Hatsue spent kissing in the shelter of massive cedar trees. The mystery element held me completely gripped – readers are just as in the dark as the jurors until very close to the end – but this is mostly a powerful picture of the lasting effects of racism. All the characters are well drawn, even minor ones like elderly defense attorney Nels Gudmundsson. Even though I only read 10 or 15 pages at a sitting over the course of a month, every time I picked up the book I was instantly immersed in the atmosphere, whether it was a warm courtroom with a snowstorm swirling outside or a troop ship entering the Pacific Theater. This has the epic feel of a doorstopper, though it’s only 400 pages. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.

As this story unfolded, I found myself sympathizing with all the characters: Kabuo's prideful endurance of racism, Ishmael's broken spirit, Carl's position between his defiant mother and what he knew was right, and Hatsue's pull between youthful romance and the expectations of her culture. What touched me most was Ishmael's story, his broken heart and his fear in war. I felt so sad for him.

The fog-covered island was a beautiful setting for these rich, interlacing stories of people trying to make sense of what the war had done to their lives. I could feel the emotion in this community that pulled me back into the '50s where veterans could not forget the war nor could interment camp refugees forget their wrongs. Combine the laconic personality of fishermen with an era known for putting on your best face and all these underlying currents of hate and resentment are bound to explode.

I found myself going back and forth about my suspicion of guilt as the mystery unfolded. The pacing of the mystery was well done. I did however find myself skimming overly descriptive, or even re-descriptive paragraphs, and some of the repetitive trial dialogue. I think the book could have been shortened by a good hundred pages, all that lengthy description of boats and houses and ceders, and still been powerful.

In my quest to read more books from my library, once again I have just read a beautiful autographed gem from my bookshelves, Snow Falling on Cedars, a debut novel by David Guterson first published in 1994. The story takes place on the fictional island of San Piedro, an island of rugged and spectacular beauty in Puget Sound, renowned for its salmon fishing and strawberry farming. The book highlights the treatment of Japanese citizens during World War II in the American West, such as internment camps splitting families of Japanese descent. Snow Falling on Cedars highlights their treatment during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s in the Pacific Northwest. This is a very lyrical and atmospheric novel as it evokes throughout the richness and raw beauty of the sea and the land, and sometimes even its people, as well as its inherent danger.

The year is 1954 but the shadow of World War II is present in the courtroom where Kabuo Miyamoto’s trial is underway for the brutal killing of a fellow salmon fisherman, Carl Heine. Ishmael Chambers, who lost an arm in the Pacific war now runs the island newspaper inherited from his father and is one of the reporters covering the trial. It is this trial that brings him close once again to Hatsu Miyamoto, the wife of the accused man and his boyhood love. But now, as a heavy snowfall surrounds and impedes the progress of Kabuo Miyamoto’s trial, a decorated war veteran, they all must come to a reckoning, not only with the past, but with culture, nature, and love. It was said best on the cover of my book: ”Both suspenseful and beautifully crafted, ‘Snow Falling on Cedars’ portrays the psychology of a community, the ambiguities of justice, the racism that persists even between neighbors, and the necessity of individual moral action despite the indifference of nature and circumstance.”

Ishmael, reflecting on his father as he sat in his study admiring the desk that his father had built himself from a vast expanse of cherry wood, the size of an English baron’s dining table with smoked glass covering much of it. As he stared at his bookcases with collected Shakespeare, Jefferson essays, Thoreau, Paine, Hawthorn, Twain and Dickens, he thought of his father and how he ran the newspaper noting that he was an anguished editorialist incapable of fully indulging himself when it came to condemnation.

n  

”For he’d recognized limits and the grayness of the world, which is what endeared him to island life, limited as it was by surrounding waters, which imposed upon islanders certain duties and conditions foreign to mainlanders. An enemy on an island is an enemy forever, he’d been fond of reminding his son. There was no blending into an anonymous background, no neighboring society to shift toward. Islanders were required, by the very nature of their landscape, to watch their step moment by moment. No one trod easily upon the emotions of another where the sea licked everywhere against an endless shoreline.”

n

One part court room drama, one part historical context of a small community and a land agreement between immigrants and a white, I guess middle class, back when middle class meant something, family. The two of whom are linked in a myriad of ways, not the least of which is the two younger siblings being socialized in the same are, but still very much raised in two worlds. When a member of the community is killed, a member of the Japanese family is fingered. An incident that ignites a powder keg in the town brewing for some time, and sparks the introspection and dissection of the community and two families being examined.

While it does feel slightly dated, I think this unequivocally is attempting to show the effects of war on a community; specifically propaganda and fear mongering feeding into racist ideology out-group(s). In this case, vilifying the Japanese in the war and back home alike.

It can turn a phrase and is more comprehensive in its showing of subtle interactions and motivations. It’s as much a character study as the man accused of murder is having to prove his character to white people who measure him with white standards and attitudes. Decent pacing, great description and dialogue. No real complaints, though I don’t think it knocked my socks off; probably because of the more dated aspects in the characterization of the Japanese family, which border on orientalism in the quintessential reduction of the racial identity. However, as mentioned, it is always clear what the intent of the story is.

A quiet but beautiful book. A murder trial in a small island community hinges on the interlaced histories of the islanders. Old prejudices and old loves compete with each other to find the truth.

Set in the North of Washington State, near the border with Canada in 1954, Snow Falling On Cedars focuses on the trial of a Japanese American suspected of the murder of a local fisherman. In doing so it explores the experience of Japanese Americans during and after the Second World War and the complex of prejudice and resentment they encountered. If that sounds like a preachy book, then I should add that Guterson is not given to generalisations. He is interested in individuals, the moral dilemmas they face and the struggles which accompany their decisions, whether for good or ill.

It's such a well-crafted book that it feels as though it were written in an earlier era when novels were built up slowly and solidly and there wasn't such a desperate need to grab the reader by the throat at the beginning of the book. Guterson's storytelling is slow and careful and his writing is characterised by an extraordinarily vivid evocation of place and character.

Here's how he describes the Counsel for the Defence

Nels Gudmundsson, the attorney who had been appointed to defend Kabuo Miyamoto, rose to cross-examine Art Moran with a slow and deliberate geriatric awkwardness, then roughly cleared the phlegm from his throat and hooked his thumbs behind his suspenders where they met their tiny black catch buttons. At seventy-nine, Nels was blind in his left eye and could distinguish only shades of light and darkness through its transient, shadowy pupil. The right, however, as if to make up for this deficiency, seemed preternaturally observant, even prescient, and as he plodded over the courtroom floorboards, advancing with a limp toward Art Moran, motes of light winked through it

And here's how he describes the beginning of the storm which provides the ever-present backdrop to the trial.

Outside the wind blew steadily from the north, driving snow against the courthouse. By noon three inches had settled on the town, a snow so ethereal it could hardly be said to have settled at all; instead it swirled like some icy fog, like the breath of ghosts, up and down Amity Harbor’s streets — powdery dust devils, frosted puffs of ivory cloud, spiraling tendrils of white smoke. By noon the smell of the sea was eviscerated, the sight of it mistily depleted, too; one’s field of vision narrowed in close, went blurry and snowbound, fuzzy and opaque, the sharp scent of frost burned in the nostrils of those who ventured out of doors. The snow flew up from their rubber boots as they struggled, heads down, toward Petersen’s Grocery. When they looked out into the whiteness of the world the wind flung it sharply at their narrowed eyes and foreshortened their view of everything.

Everything in this novel is clearly visualized and set out with a eye for salient detail. It's a compelling work of fiction that belongs, in my opinion, in the front rank of post-war American fiction.

Excellent writing and story. Loved it.

another white guy writing about another tragic woman of japanese descent. i found it self-indulgent.

I started this book not knowing what it was going to be about... the title told me nothing. As it turns out, it's a murder mystery, a love story, a war story, and a courtroom drama. Oh, and also about racism. Everything but science fiction is in here!
The writing impressed me. Early on, there is a part that I liked so much I wrote it down: "People appeared enormously foolish to him. He understood that they were only animated cavities full of jelly and strings and liquids." (pg.35). That's pretty dark. But it gets darker! The WWII battle scene was as gorily realistic as Saving Private Ryan.
The reason I gave it 4 stars instead of 5 is because towards the end, the author started describing, in excruciating detail, every step the reporter Ishmael Chambers takes when a snowstorm knocks out the power in the small town of San Piedro; his trip to the grocery store, the hardware store, the mechanic's to get snow chains put on his tires (Ishmael has only one arm, lost in the war). Then we get to read about every step the bailiff makes as he opens the courthouse. These were totally unimportant and a waste of time reading, had nothing to advance the plot. Seemed like filler. I felt like the author didn't know what to do for a while.
I won't spoil the ending. I will just recommend this book to people who like gripping dramas.